1. Field
This disclosure is generally related to document management. More specifically, this disclosure is related to generating a document so that its salient content is emphasized and non-salient content is obscured.
2. Related Art
Document sharing is an important part of everyday work. For example, people send documents to a co-worker for comments, mark-up, or reading. However, often only a subset of a document's content is required for specific recipients. For example, only a single section in a document might be relevant for a specific recipient.
In a conventional document-sharing system, a user can send the recipient the entire document or only a portion of it. It is possible for the user to highlight relevant sections (e.g., with yellow highlights, change-bars, or marginalia) prior to sending so the recipient can more easily identify the relevant sections. However, the recipient is usually required to scroll down to find the first relevant section and then manually navigate from one relevant section to another. Moreover, the recipient might be presented with too much context: either the relevant sections do not stand out enough from the context or sensitive material is revealed in the context, which should not have been included in the sent document. Furthermore, one recipient's sensitive material might differ from another's.
Alternatively, the user could cut only the relevant sections and then paste and send them to the recipient as a separate document. However, cutting and pasting is cumbersome, disrupts normal reference numbering, and removes the context around the cut-and-pasted section. Such context might be important for the recipient to understand how the section fits in the entire document. Such context might also be important when incorporating the recipient's comments or changes into the original document.
In some situations, the recipient might already be familiar with the details of the context and might only need a hint of the context's details to recall the context and better understand the relevant sections. In other situations, the context might contain sensitive information which should be restricted from the recipient. Conventional document-sharing systems do not include a way of reducing the level of detail to context or restricting access to sensitive context. Reducing the level of detail is important as a focusing method for the recipient: less detail in non-relevant parts means the recipient can better focus on the relevant details. In other words, the non-relevant parts should not draw the recipient's attention.
Moreover, conventional document-sharing systems make it difficult to navigate between relevant sections. Systems such as Microsoft Word® enable a user to move between commented or changed sections, but the recipient sees the full context between those sections rather than a high-level view of the context. More generally, conventional document-sharing systems allow only simple distribution of shared information. For example, these systems cannot determine that only certain recipients with a certain role at a certain organization should or should not see particular sections. Conventional document-sharing systems also do not allow the identification of sharable or restricted sections based on content analysis of the sections and their context.
Some document-sharing systems enable tagging of relevant sections for sharing or restriction. However, once the recipient receives such a tagged document, the context is displayed as a step function (i.e., all or nothing) and immediate navigation between relevant tagged sections is not possible.